Each Discovery Pack box comes with an OCB Style Guide with a built in ‘got it/need it’ check box for beer lovers to track OCB member brews they’ve tried… or still need to try! Alternately, you can download the Style Guide from their website.

Available for a limited time and in limited quantities, the pack is available through the LCBO. If you don’t see the Discovery Pack at your local LCBO, simply ask for it or use the OCB’s first App – a beer locator – available here. The app lets you browse a list of OCB beers and breweries sold in the LCBO and The Beer Store, displays tasting notes about the beers and shows you the closest locations carrying your desired beer or brand!

Support your local brewers and pick up a Discovery Pack before they’re gone!

Black Creek Historic Brewery is thrilled to announce that our Black Creek Olde Stout is now available at LCBO stores across Ontario! Our Olde Stout brew will be our spring and summer offering in the LCBO stores in and around the GTA. Ed, our head brewer describes the Pale Ale as a “Deep amber brown colour with finely textured creamy head; aromas of nut, dark chocolate and roasted malt with earthy, grassy notes; bittersweet, medium bodied, flavours of roast coffee, cooked fruit and clean nutty flavours, with tones of earth, ash and chocolate; a pleasant hoppy bitterness on the finish.”

For those who loved our porter, now is the time to hit up the LCBO und Toronto still have some stock left, but when it’s gone it’ll be gone for a while! To find if your local LCBO store carries our beers, click here. If they don’t, ask them to!

Our Olde Stout was recently featured in Toronto’s ‘Now’ newspaper as part of their “30 of the Best Local Brews” cover story. You can check out the article here.

Opening day is rapidly approaching and with it comes all those wonderful harbingers of spring – baby animals, warmer weather and little hop vines poking their heads out of the soil. This is the fourth year that our hops rhizomes have been in the ground and after a winter blanket of mulch and manure they are raring to go!

In 1874, Charles Whitcombe gave Canadian farmers the following advice in The Canadian farmer’s manual of agriculture:

The quality of the hops depends greatly upon the soil in which it is raised. As a rule, the stronger the land, the more bitter and strong the flavour and quality of the hop. From such land they are in great demand amongst brewers of porter. On lighter lands, although the hop may grow luxuriantly (when land is well enriched) and produce abundantly, they usually contain a less amount of farina and are what is technically called a lesser “condition,” and this quality of hop is also in demand by the brewers of the lighter kind of table-beer.

As our hops become more and more established the flavours will change as the plants grow stronger. Our first year of harvest produced rather small cones which imparted a very delicate flavour in our Wet Hop Ale. The harvest from 2011 produced many large cones with a distinctive odour and greater quantities of lupulin (what Whitcombe and many period texts refer to as “farina”), which in turn produced stronger flavours in the Wet Hop and 1 Mile beers we produced. According to most farm manuals from the 19th century, this year should be our defining harvest as the plants are well established and have acclimated to their new home. I guess we’ll just have to wait until September to see!